Generate Spanish subtitles for your Italian videos

How Italian audio becomes Spanish subtitles

Audio in Italian (Italiano) is transcribed first, then translated into Spanish (Español). Because the translation runs on the transcript rather than on the audio, the Spanish subtitle file keeps the timings of the original Italian speech — each line appears at the moment it was actually said.

Both languages are written in the Latin alphabet, so the file needs nothing from your player beyond that script.

Why translate Italian video into Spanish

Italian is spoken principally in Italy, San Marino and southern Switzerland; Spanish in Spain and most of Latin America. A Spanish subtitle track is what lets one recording reach both audiences without re-recording, re-editing or dubbing it.

Because subtitles are a separate file rather than part of the picture, you can attach several language tracks to the same video and let viewers pick.

About the Italian audio

Standard Italian transcribes cleanly — spelling follows pronunciation closely. The complication is that much of what gets called an Italian dialect is a separate language rather than an accent, and Neapolitan or Sicilian speech will not transcribe as standard Italian however clear the recording is.

About the Spanish subtitles

European and Latin American Spanish differ in pronunciation, pronoun use and a good deal of everyday vocabulary, and Caribbean and Rioplatense speech diverge further still. All transcribe well; the variety is preserved rather than standardised.

What a Italian to Spanish subtitle file looks like

Four lines of Italian speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the Italian speaker's — translation does not move them, which is why the file drops onto the original video unchanged.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Buenos días a todos.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Gracias a todos por venir.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Escriban sus preguntas abajo.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Eso es todo por hoy.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in Italian may need loosening to read well in Spanish.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.